“I had no idea where we were, and I think no one else had,” Dawes continued. “All around was the roar of musketry, but immediately about us was literally the silence of death. The ground was strewn with the slain of both armies.” Then up ahead Dawes saw the sergeant major of the 77th and called out to ask him if he knew where his regiment was.
“I don’t know,” the sergeant major replied. “I was captured this morning and just escaped.”
“Come with us,” shouted Dawes.
“No,” he said, “I am going with this regiment,” pointing to “a regiment in full ranks, marching through a field on lower ground, uniformed in blue, marching smartly by flank to a drum beat.” Dawes was suddenly perplexed. “It did not seem possible,” he said, “that a Union regiment in such condition could be coming from the battle line.” He moved nearer and took a closer look, then tugged at the sergeant major, and hissed, “They are Rebels.”
“They are not,” insisted the sergeant major, but just then “the wind lifted the silken folds of their banner. It was the Louisiana State flag!” This was, in fact, the illustrious Orleans Guards battalion Gardes d’Orle’ans, the Louisiana French-Creole regiment mentioned earlier who went into battle in their prewar blue Federal militia uniforms and at one point were attacked by soldiers from their own side.
Dawes and his little band of fugitives continued to wander north, seeking some sign of their regiment or brigade—even their division. Someone pointed out a man on a horse wearing a long brown duster, about 200 yards distant, and said, “There is major Sauger” (one of Sherman’s staff officers). “I ran towards him (wherever I went the seven men of our regiment followed),” Dawes said, “waving my hat to attract his attention. I came up with him and [saluting] said, ‘Major, where is our brigade?’ ”
“I don’t know where anybody is,” came the reply, and as the officer turned Dawes was startled to see revealed a uniform of Confederate gray under his long, brown duster.
“At just that moment,” said Dawes, “a stand of grape [shot] came whirring through the air and struck just under his horse, the horse ran away and I never heard the rest of the story.” It was only afterward Dawes learned that he had just reported to the Rebel general Thomas Hindman.
At that point a Confederate battery set up uncomfortably close and began throwing shot and shell Dawes’s way. “It did not seem best to try to drive it away with seven men,” he said, but concluded that its line of fire was most likely pointed to where the Union troops were, so Dawes decided that, “if we could follow [the Rebel shells] and not get shot, we could surely find somebody.”
By this point it must have seemed like they were marching toward the end of the world, but about half a mile down an old farm road they came upon Colonel Hildebrand, their erstwhile brigade commander, “sitting on his horse by an old log barn, intently watching the swaying lines and waving banners of troops fighting in a long open field to the south.”
“Now we are all right,” Dawes told his men, and he went up to the old colonel, asking, “Where is the brigade?”
“I don’t know,” was the reply. “Go along down that road and I guess you may find some of them.”
Dawes suddenly became indignant, and then insubordinate. “Why don’t you come with us, get the men together and do something?” he demanded.
“Go along down that road,” Hildebrand snapped. “I want to watch this fight.”
“Cannon shot were whizzing through the air, bullets were spatting against the old barn,” Dawes said. “It was not an ideal place to tarry.” He marched his seven men down the road that the colonel had suggested, presently coming upon a fellow officer, Lieutenant Henrickle, “a typical battle picture. His arm and shoulder were covered with blood where a wounded man had fallen against him. His coat was torn by a bullet; his face was stained with powder; his lips were blackened by biting cartridges; he carried a gun. His eyes shone like fire. He was the man we had long sought. I said to him, ‘Jack, where is the brigade?’ He pointed across a ravine and said, ‘Part of your regiment and part of mine are right down this way a little.’
“I felt like falling on his neck and weeping for joy,” Dawes said.
Captain Dawes’s odyssey that morning, or something like it, was being played out all through the rest of Sherman’s brigades and regiments, who were being driven relentlessly back by the Rebel onslaught. Men lost, men confused, men frightened; men surrounded by death and hating themselves for becoming inured to it, or for being scared by it; men who were trying to do their duty and men who had abandoned it. They were not ready for this contest—but the Confederates were just as green. Death was in the air, and there was nothing left but to fight it out and let the devil take the hindmost.
Very soon after rejoining the 53rd Ohio, now reduced to 250, Dawes and his seven faithful men were placed in a long, jagged line containing the remnants of Sherman’s and Prentiss’s divisions, as well as men from the divisions of W.H.L. Wallace, McClernand, and Stephen Hurlbut, who were girding themselves for a last stand along a stretch of the battlefield more than a mile back from their original line. What would happen during these next few hours would stand prominent in history alongside Gettysburg’s Cemetery Hill, Pickett’s Charge, and the Bloody Lane at Antietam. But those things were all in the future, including the next two hours at Shiloh, and the American people at that point had no idea, no context, for grasping the scope of the devastation and the overwhelming suffering caused by this civil war. They would learn it, though, as it hit them periodically, like terrible shock waves, one after the other, when the battle news came in.
During all of that violent and gory morning Sherman had been riding around his collapsing lines trying to shore people up and redirecting traffic as best he could. He had been shot twice, including the painful wound in his hand he’d got in his original encounter. He had wrapped it in a handkerchief and stuck it inside his tunic and kept going. Three horses, including his favorite mare, had been shot from under him.
An aide from headquarters who appeared at midmorning to check on how things were going found Sherman resting briefly beneath a tree. “Tell Grant if he has any men to spare I can use them. If not, I will do the best I can. We are holding them pretty well just now, but it’s hot as hell.”
1 During the Civil War soldiers learned to be particularly leery of cannon fire in the woods, because the solid shot were fully capable of bringing down huge tree limbs with a terrific crash, and though there are no recorded figures it is safe to say many men were killed or injured being crushed or struck by these objects.
CHAPTER 10
WHAT FOLLOWED, NO MAN COULD WELL DESCRIBE
ULYSSES S. GRANT, FROM HIS HEADQUARTERS at Savannah, Tennessee, had boarded the steamboat Tigress for Pittsburg Landing. By most reckonings that would have been between 7 and 7:30 a.m., and it would probably have taken Tigress about two hours to make the nine-mile trip upstream against the swift current of the flooded river.1
Before leaving, Grant fired off a message to Buell, who had arrived during the night on the outskirts of town with an advance party, saying there was a battle in the works and he had best prepare to march his men toward a spot opposite Pittsburg Landing where they could be ferried across by the available steamboats. Meantime, Maj. Gen. “Bull” Nelson—the gigantic Kentuckian and Annapolis graduate whom Grant had sent to take Nashville after the fall of Fort Donelson—was stewing in his own juice. Nelson’s division, the vanguard of Buell’s army, had arrived just outside Savannah the afternoon before, where Nelson somehow developed a premonition of a Confederate attack on Grant’s army.
On Sunday morning, just as his troops were preparing for inspection, the noise of battle began to drift from Pittsburg Landing toward Savannah and stirred Nelson into action. “He had not yet arisen,” recalled an aide, when “he sprang from his couch. He called for Lieutenant Southgate … and ordered him to have the brigade commanders to have their men in readiness to move at any moment.” Then he sent another aid
e to see if any transports had arrived during the night. As the firing continued, the aide said, Nelson, “still awaiting Grant’s orders, chafed like a lion caged. He ate no breakfast, paced up and down before his tent, could not be pacified, and would not be pleased with anything or anybody.”
Finally, “unwilling to endure his torturing suspense, he mounted his horse and galloped to Grant’s headquarters,” only to find that the commanding general had left. But soon after that—the aide gives the hour at a little past 8 a.m.—Nelson received Grant’s orders to march his division “to a point opposite Pittsburg,” saying, “You can easily find a guide in the city.” It was a good thing, too, that Grant had thought to set these people in motion; he was going to need all the infantry divisions he could get.
A little less than halfway up the Tennessee from Savannah to Pittsburg was Crump’s Landing, where the division of Lew Wallace had been parked because it was felt there was not enough room for it to camp at Pittsburg. As they neared Crump’s Grant told the steamer skipper to run in close. There, in anticipation, Lew Wallace was waiting on the shore and shouted out, “My division is in line, waiting for orders.”
Grant hollered back that as soon as he reached Pittsburg Landing and found out where and what the attack was he would send him orders. This Grant did, but for reasons never quite fully explained Lew Wallace’s division never arrived on the battlefield that day.
Grant continued on toward the sounds of the firing, which became alarmingly heavy the farther south they steamed. It was going to be a difficult day all around for Grant: Two nights earlier when his horse slipped in the darkness of a rainstorm he’d fallen on his ankle, badly spraining it, and he was reduced to using crutches.
When he reached Pittsburg Landing, Grant was mortified by what he saw. Streams of stretcher bearers were carrying wounded to hospital boats. Officers were shouting madly to get men moving off of other boats, and even to keep boats from fleeing. Horse and mule wagons hauling cases of cartridges and artillery ammunition were driven in clouds of astonishing profanity to the top of the bluff where they could be distributed along the fighting front.
Most galling, the entire slope from brow to basin was thronged with thousands of panic-stricken shirkers and stragglers who were cowering beneath the cover of the bluff—and more coming in all the time—many of them crying out to anyone who would listen, “We are whipped! We have been cut to pieces!” Grant seemed to exhibit a rare sort of sympathy toward them, unlike some of the officers in his and Buell’s armies who threatened to have them hanged or shot or (Buell’s own preference) have the navy gunboats turn loose their cannons on them.
“It was a case of Southern dash against Northern pluck and endurance,” Grant wrote later in his memoirs. “Three of the five divisions engaged on Sunday were entirely raw, and many of the men had only received their arms on their way from their states to the field. Many of them had arrived but a day or two before and were hardly able to load their muskets according to the manual.”
In any case, Grant realized that most of these men “would rather be shot where they lay” than return to the fight, and he wasted no time on them. Hoisted upon his horse with the crutches strapped to his saddle, he rode off the steamer plank where he was met by his adjutant John A. Rawlins, who told him the attack was general, all along the Union lines. Thus informed, Grant and his staff rode up the hill toward the shooting.
Lt. William R. Rowley, one of Grant’s aides, trotted up after watching the influx of stragglers and other fugitives from the fighting.
“General, this thing looks pretty squally, don’t’ it?” he asked.
“Well, not so very bad,” Grant replied. “We’ve got to fight against time now. [Lew] Wallace must be here very soon.”
“Firing grew sharp upon the left where the troops were breaking very badly,” according to A. D. Richardson, one of Grant’s early biographers. “Grant and his staff galloped to a little open field in front of a deserted cabin. Across the field was a rebel battery, which instantly opened upon them. The first shell struck just in front of the General.
“ ‘We must ride fast here,’ said Grant.
“They rode behind the cabin a moment, but shells crashed through the roof, covering them with shingles.
“Grant: ‘The old building don’t seem to be a very good shelter; suppose we move on.’
“As they did, a bullet struck the General’s scabbard and threw it up into the air. The sword dropped out and was never recovered,” Richardson wrote.
Lying on one of the hospital ships at the landing was Pvt. Robert Fleming, the clerk in Colonel Hildebrand’s headquarters who had found himself wounded in the fighting and thought he was “done for.” After the surgeon of the field hospital where he’d gone for help had ordered the place evacuated, Fleming made his way to one of the hospital boats at the landing. Men with stretchers were kept busy, Fleming said, carrying the wounded onto the boats, and also “carrying men off the boats as quickly as they succumbed to their wounds, and laying them in a row on a level ledge about halfway up the bank.”
Somehow Fleming found out that his brother, a sergeant two years his senior, was also on the boat, desperately wounded. Fleming went to him but “saw at a glance that death was written on his face.” A doctor had already told Fleming’s brother that his wound was mortal, and there was little Fleming could do but make him a pillow of his own shirt, filled with hay, and wait for him to die.
Fleming also noticed that one of these men being carried to the dead line “attempted to raise his head. Two Sisters of Charity who were on the boat quickly went to his aid, and brought him back aboard.”
The Sisters were among some 600 Catholic nuns from a dozen different orders generically referred to as the Sisters of Charity, who truly were angels of mercy on the battlefields during the Civil War. They were looked at askance in some quarters because they nursed both Union and Confederate wounded—and some were even accused of spying—but the torn and dying men and boys seemed profoundly grateful to have a woman’s touch in their distress, which often reminded them of home.
The work the Sisters did was not a “proper” type thing that women engaged in during the mid-19th century. One Sister described the deck of a hospital ship she was serving on as “looking like a slaughterhouse, with doctors tossing overboard arms and legs to a watery grave.” When one of the doctors’ wives suggested to a nun that this was not a fit place for women, the Sister paraphrased Jesus from the Bible, “Whatever ye do not doest to the least of these, ye do not doest to me.”
There were women other than the Sisters of Charity at Shiloh that day. Officers’ wives often visited their husbands in the field and even though it would not have been approved of at Pittsburg Landing because of the impending operations, 29-year-old Ann Wallace, wife of one of Grant’s division commanders, General W.H.L. Wallace, had come down by steamer. The trip would become the ordeal of her life.
She had come aboard the steamer Minnehaha, which brought a cargo of fresh Iowa troops to Pittsburg Landing before dark. During a brief stop at Savannah, Mrs. Wallace had learned that her husband was now in the field commanding the division of Gen. C. F. Smith, who was lying ill in the Cherry mansion.
Wallace was a 41-year-old Illinois lawyer, Mexican War veteran, and friend of Abraham Lincoln, who had received his military training in the state militia. He was tall, spare, and balding, with a beaklike nose on a narrow face, a recessed chin, and tufts of hair that stuck out on the top and sides of his head so that he resembled a contemporary image of Washington Irving’s timid schoolteacher Ichabod Crane. But in fact Wallace was a solid, highly competent, and courageous officer who, according to the well-known journalist Charles C. Coffin, “could bring order out of confusion and by a word, a look, or an act, inspire his men.” Unbeknownst to Ann Wallace, as the steamer pulled into Pittsburg Landing, with all of its chaos, her husband, out on the battlefield, was undergoing a trial of the severest nature.
Respectfully, a captain in an
Illinois regiment offered to walk Mrs. Wallace out to her husband’s headquarters. “We heard a great deal of firing,” she said, “but it was accounted for by the return of the night pickets and the discharge of their guns.2 I had put on my hat and gloves, when Captain Coats suggested that perhaps it would be better for him to first find out how far it was, and perhaps I had better ride. So I remained on the boat.
“Before half an hour Captain Coats came back wounded in two places, one painful wound in the hand, but neither of them dangerous. I learned that a big battle was in progress and that my husband had moved with his command to the front. The only thing then to do was to wait where I was. That long day on that steamboat, its scenes and sensations, are beyond description,” Mrs. Wallace said. “The wounded were brought by hundreds onto the boat. I did not hear a groan or murmur except those unconscious under influence of chloroform or sleep. I passed from place to place holding water and handing bandages for the surgeons until it became so crowded I felt I was in the way.”
Another woman caring for the Union wounded that day was 44-year-old Mary A. Newcomb, whose husband had been in General Wallace’s division before he died of wounds received in the Battle of Fort Henry. She’d had the devil of a time even getting him buried in Effingham County, Illinois; because of the strong Rebel sentiment no Presbyterian minister would preside over the funeral, and she’d had to settle for a Methodist preacher. Mary had become a sort of unofficial nurse and surrogate mother to her dead husband’s regiment, the 11th Illinois Volunteers. Even Grant had joked that he’d commit himself to the hospital if Mary was doing the cooking.